Drupal and Front-End Web Developer

Experimenting with Toto

Saturday, June 18th, 2011

I wanted a place where I could work on writing down some of the things I do in terms of my work with the simplest barebones mechanism under the hood as possible. I came across Toto and it seemed like the perfect choice.

What the hell is Toto?

Toto is a simple ruby-based blogging/publishing engine (by cloudhead who you may also know for working on the totally kickass LESS, but more about that another time) that manages to not get itself tied down in all the “OMG MUST HAVE” features that everything else seems to make part of the core (comments, file uploads, user management, blah blah blah). All wonderful things in their own right and with perfectly valid use cases, but more than I need for what I want to actually do here.

Instead, everything in Toto is done in flat text files managed via Git and if you use Heroku for (theoretically) free hosting (which is the recommended option that’s baked into the tutorial) it’s your vector for publishing out to your server as well.

It sounds like an odd direction to go since I’ve pretty-much been a full-time Drupal guy since last August, but I just didn’t need the overhead that comes with it just to be able to write some things down and push them onto the web.

What the hell were you trying to accomplish with this thing?

Basically, I just wanted a place where I’d be able to write down some of the things I’ve learned and consider helpful. I work in a field with lots of weird little technical pitfalls and frankly it’s in the best interest of all of us to talk about what we find to help be able to organize real solutions to them (much less ways to identify them, I’m looking at you IE).

I don’t think I have anything particularly revolutionary to be said, but it just feels like its time to start getting some of it out of my head and onto the page, err, screen. Or something like that…